“He told her nowt, and so she were wrong to do what she did. More, her friend failed to tell her owt, so she were just as guilty. The copper was no help; he couldn’t stop a pig in a ginnel!”
English is my first language. I had
no trouble following the dialogue in the British TV series, Last Tango in
Halifax. Language is my main preoccupation; I guess I’m a Sapir-Whorf
Theory kind of guy, bearing a belief that we think in our language, so that
a language deficiency results in a thought impairment. This is either amazing
insight, or the musings of a theoretician who “couldn’t stop a pig in a
ginnel!”
Halifax in that series isn’t
in Nova Scotia, but in West Yorkshire. I won’t review Last Tango in Halifax except
to say it’s nothing like Last Tango in Paris, and that we gave up on it
early because we tired of watching characters repeatedly wallowing in miseries
of their own making.
I was a volunteer with MCC in Europe
from 1986-89, a long enough time of relearning the German language to
distinguish among Bavarian German, Rheinland-Pfalz and Hamburg German, the
latter said to be the purest German of all. Speakers of any of these understand
each other well, although they’re very adept at pinpointing your origin if you
should happen to speak.
Writers of prose (especially fiction) or verse, plays, screenplays, even journalism must be life-long language students—to contend the obvious—if they’re to succeed to gain a readership. I wrote a short story once in which an antagonist was a foul-mouthed and violent man. I thought about my mother reading, “Get the hell off my property, you son-of-a-bitch!” I’m sure she would have been appalled. On the other hand, if he’d said, “Please leave, you person I don’t like,” I might as well have scrubbed him from the story, and if he wasn’t in the story, was there any point to that attempt at all?
A far
greater challenge involves mastering the language appropriate to a) the topic,
and b) the audience. The Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease[1]
calculator told me that the level in which this piece is written is about Grade
10.6, so a high school graduate should—by this token—read this with ease.
Writing in a dialect appropriate to
the place and characters of your story is difficult, and the best advice is the
old “go where you know” maxim.
Of course not every reader is a
curious, life-long explorer of language and ideas, nor is everyone in a
position to spend much time reading. The social networks on the internet are
turning many into surfers through endless possible diversions, an experience
that may be miles wide, but only an inch deep. If I’m lucky, ca. 100 people
will open this post and of those, only a percentage will read far enough to
know that the f**k word we still flinch to hear (especially on television) is an
example of the “dysphemism treadmill or semantic drift known as melioration, wherein former pejoratives become inoffensive and commonplace.” (Fuck - Wikipedia)
Finally, if you wake up in an
unfamiliar place and a man approaches and you ask, “Who are you?” and he says, “I's
the b'ye that builds the boat and I's the b'ye that sails her./ I's the b'ye
that catches the fish and brings 'em home to Lizer,” you probably know where in
Canada you are.
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